[SPN] therapist

“Can you tell me what made you decide to come to a therapist, Poe?”

The answer was complex, so she replied with what started everything, “I was having problems with my fiancé.”

“Was?”

“We’re no longer together, but my relationship with him - and the issues involved with it - were the start.”

“Would you like to elaborate?”

This, she was comfortable talking about. It was old news, something she was used to people knowing. At least, part of it. “My ex, Ryan, when I met him, he was a casual heroin user. I’m familiar with drugs, I occasionally smoke pot myself. His infrequent use wasn’t a huge issue to me, nor was it the main reason we broke up - though it was a part of it. We were together for about two years, probably closer to two and a half. We got engaged a year or so into the relationship. I’m not a stupid person, I never would have agreed to an engagement to the thing he turned into.”

“Thing?”

Her face flushed briefly with an expression of worry, as if someone had caught her in the act - red handed. “Ryan wasn’t himself, in many ways. It wasn’t just the drug use, I understand how it can change a person’s personality, their priorities, and desires. This was something else, something unnatural. It’s as if, one day, he was his normal self and the next, something else.”

“What do you mean by ‘something else’?”

“He was,” She sighed a little, as if this should be something easy to explain and the therapist should both know and understand what’s she’s speaking of, but she knows she’ll have to explain everything in excruciating detail. “It’s like he was possessed.” She paused again, worrying her left ring finger a moment before letting out a second sigh. “He was possessed, actually. I still can’t believe I was so stupid to not see it earlier. I thought it was the drugs, maybe he’d gotten something bad, something harder, more addictive. I thought that it was all that typical personality-altering bullshit, but it wasn’t. He was possessed by a demon and I let it live with him - live with me - for a year. I tried to help him, I did! I did everything I could imagine to get the Ryan I loved back.” It sounds like she’s begging forgiveness. “I felt obligated to stay, to help. I did it for a year. I think, if Dean hadn’t shown up, I’d still be doing it.”

“Dean?”

“I met Dean around Halloween. We come from…similar types of families, we had some things in common. He was the complete opposite of Ryan. He was cocky, bold, confident. He was exactly what I needed - apparently - to break things off with Ryan. I thought that, if I was willing to sleep with this stranger, to become so invested in this person I barely knew, to cheat on my own fiancé, that it really was over. Nothing I could do would fix the things wrong with out relationship.” She shrugged, raising her shoulders slightly with a touch of defeat. “So I slept with Dean and I broke it off with Ryan the very next day.”

“That wasn’t the end of it?”

She laughed a little, though there wasn’t any humor present in the noise. “A few days later, we ran into Ryan on the street after going to a bar. Dean was drunk and heckled him. A few days after that, Ryan showed up at my apartment. He was strung out, I think he was high. He had this awful, black wound on the inside of his arm, where he shoots up. I told him I was done, that I couldn’t help him anymore. I yelled at him about the wound and we got into an argument. Ryan hardly ever raised his voice at me. Dean came over, to see what was going on, and Ryan went off on him. They exchanged words and Ryan got angry. He swung and I don’t think he ever intended to hit me, he’d never raised a hand at me in all the time I’d known him. Ryan wasn’t an inherently angry person. Irritated about things, annoyed, even frustrated, but not angry like he got that night. But he swung, probably aiming for Dean, but I was between the two of them and his fist connected with my jaw. I almost lost a molar. Dean went off on him. I should have stopped him, but I was in such shock at what had happened. I just stood in the doorway and watched as Dean kept kicking him in the ribs.” She frowns, looking guilty. “I thought that would be it. I went to the hospital to get my tooth fixed and assumed that would be the end of it.”

“No again?”

“I came home from work one evening,” She continues, “Probably a week or two later. Ryan was there waiting for me. I don’t know how he got in, if he was possessed, my apartment is protected against that sort of thin, but he was there. We had a fight - a physical fight. He was stronger than I’d ever known Ryan to be. Ryan couldn’t lift a two pound box, let alone restrain me. After a scuffle, neither of us were terribly hurt. I managed to trap him and exorcise the demon possessing him.”

“You exorcised the demon?”

She was sure the therapist thought she was insane, but these weren’t terms she was using as metaphors. She really mean demons and exorcisms and possessions. “It’s a simple Latin script, comes from the Catholic Rituale Romanum. After I exorcised him, he was the same Ryan I knew, but he remembered little about his possession. I didn’t have the heart to explain everything, so I called him an ambulance. I told him I couldn’t go with him and he understood. I begged him, made him promise to get help. Go to rehab, get off the drugs. He promised and we parted ways when the paramedics shows up.”

“Did you see him after that?”

“Not for some time. I wanted to go see him in the hospital and, in retrospect, I really should have. But I thought that if I did, it would trigger another chain of events. I didn’t want that for him and I didn’t want that for me. So I kept my distance. I learnt from from a mutual friend of ours that Ryan had moved to Seattle after he was in rehab and he was doing really well.”

“And how about you? How were you doing?”

“I felt free. I felt like this great weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I mean, I still had other issues I was dealing with, but bringing the Ryan thing to a close was a great relief. After that, I could deal with just about anything that life threw at me.”